Bound of Pandora
We have done some research on various art style on different games. After some discussion we decided to choose the art style of plain colour and low-polygon model which can bring a clean and simple feeling to the game. Moreover because the undeveloped village should have a sense of innocent and pure, we believed that a simple art style will be more suitable to our theme.
We found a game call ‘The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker’, an action-adventure game, as one of our game art style reference. They filled their model’s texture with a plain and brightful colours, it creates a casual and comfortable ambience to the game which we believe is suitable for our game too.
Art style research: Texturing
We have done another research on an action role-playing game call ‘Necropolis’, which has a low-polygon style for their models. Although the colour and lighting of the whole game are gloomy, we can still see the player action clearly, because the models are clear and simple. We think that a clean and smooth movement in an action game is important for player to fully understand and control their actions in order to immerse themselves into the game, therefore we consider low-polygon model as one of our art style element.
Art style research: Modeling
We found that there is a web game called “Lightsaber Escape” developed by Google as a promotion for the Star Wars movie. It uses a smartphone as the game controller. Players would need to connect their phone to the game on the computer by browsing a specific link, it will automatically recognise and start synchronising with the movement of the smartphone. Before the game start, it will recommends player to put their phone in front of the center of the screen for initialising the position so that the phone matches the correct coordinate system.
The length of this game is extremely short, it only takes around 5 mins to finish the entire game. Also, the game did not support moving around which means the character is standing at a specific point. Player cannot control the character movement. Flourishing the phone in this is weird because most of the gameplay consist of blocking and reflecting the incoming beam rather than using the sword to do the combat fight with the enemies. Therefore, it actually did not support slashing.
Research on game mechanics
The game level design of Bound of Pandora is inspired by another game Furi. In Furi, player plays as a dangerous clone who is trapped in a highly advance prison with multiple levels. The player’s objective is to beat the guard in each level one by one and escape from the prison, each guard has their own story and characteristic. Throughout the story player will slowly realise he is a clone programmed to destroy the planet of the guards. In the end of the game player will break out of the jail and return to his mothership, then he will have an option to destroy or save the planet. Bound of Pandora follows a similar story progression to Furi, as this kind of story telling will be clear and easy to follow. Player will receive clues and discover the truth pieces by pieces each time they defeat an evil. Also, just like Furi, every evil in Bound of Pandora have their own background story and characteristic which makes each of them more unique and complete.